Inbound Sales: Top Strategies, Technology, and Tips to Boost Your Sales Process

Picture this: You’re in the market for new accounting software. You do a quick Google search, shortlist those that offer the features you need, and sign up for a free trial. 

Two of the three businesses you’re testing leave you alone during this process. Granted, they’re sending in-app messages that get you up and running. Other than that, you’re on your own.

The third software brand calls you mid-trial. The salesperson asks if you need any extra assistance, reinforces the features you’ll need, and walks you through how to use them while on the call.

Which are you most likely to buy a paid subscription to? Probably the latter—the company that went the extra mile to help.

This is inbound sales in a nutshell.

Inbound sales is a strategy for attracting leads to your business by sharing relevant content with your target market. Instead of spending time gathering data and reaching cold leads, the people you’re talking with already have a grasp of your business and what you’re offering. 

So, how do you put this into practice for your sales organization? 

This guide shares an inbound sales strategy you can use to point leads in your direction, alongside tips on how to convert these warm leads into paying customers. 

Why Building an Inbound Sales Strategy is a Team Effort

With inbound sales, potential customers might come your way after finding you in Google search results. Perhaps they’ve talked about your brand with colleagues at the office water cooler. Maybe they landed on a news article in which your founder contributed their expertise.

Marketers collect inbound leads and pass them on to sales. From here on out, it’s your job to contact each inbound lead and convince them to buy what you’re selling.

Inbound sales is any organization’s dream. Less time doing cold outreach and more time talking with prospects who already know and trust you? Sign me up. 

But as sales trainer Mor Assouline puts it: “Inbound leads are sales’ biggest opportunity—and biggest failure. We think because it's inbound, we don't need to try.”

Where organizations tend to go wrong is recognizing that inbound is a team effort. Disconnect between sales and marketing ultimately results in unhappy customers. The last thing you want is to promise a world-class solution in your marketing campaigns, only to let customers down when sales say that isn’t a reality.

Your entire team must be on the same page for inbound sales to work like a well-oiled machine. That includes:

• Messaging and positioning. What makes your product or service unique? How does it stack up against the competition? Consistency in communicating these details to a customer makes your solution more attractive. They know exactly what they’ll get, so by the time your warm outreach starts, the lead already knows what you’re offering.
• Offers. Promotions are a key part of marketing—Statista found that 19 percent of shoppers use discount codes for shopping inspiration (beating celebrity endorsements and online forums). Make sure sales can follow through on these promises by agreeing on campaign times, qualifying criteria, or special offers beforehand.
• Brand guidelines. What tone of voice does your business use? Whether you’re familiar with corporate jargon or prefer to show personality, give inbound leads the same consistent experience—no matter who they’re talking to. 

Here’s What You Need Before You Start Building Your Inbound Sales Strategy

Before we dive deeper into the inbound sales process, make sure you’ve laid the groundwork with these four pillars: 

• An understanding of the customer journey. Whether you’re relying more heavily on blog posts or social media, cold emails, or LinkedIn outreach, you need to know which channels your buyers are using. That’s where a well-defined buyer journey comes in. Work with marketing to craft a plan that captures the lead’s initial interest, nurtures that interest, and encourages them to make contact.
• A strong marketing team. Inbound sales relies heavily on new leads coming from somewhere. If you don't have a strong marketing team with clear objectives, you won't have enough leads coming in to justify a fully inbound process. Part of achieving this requires intentionally aligning inbound sales and marketing so that each supports the other (rather than colliding).
• A clear target audience and ICP. Marketers might drive 1,500 inbound leads, but if only 20 of them convert, is the inbound sales strategy really a success? Iron out who you’re targeting and what makes a “good” lead. This prevents wasted time, effort, and budget on reaching out to unqualified leads who aren’t a good fit.
• A business type that will thrive with inbound. Inbound is best for businesses that don’t have much capital to invest in outbound sales, or a target market that prefers buying on their own. It’s also ideal if you have something unique to say. A fresh perspective on a topic combined with an amazing team of content creators to distribute it can drive a steady stream of inbound leads your way.

Start with This Simple Inbound Sales Process

Ready to mop up qualified leads passed on from marketing? Here’s a four-step inbound sales process to follow. 

1. Capture New Leads

It’s on your marketing team’s shoulders to generate inbound leads. They might come from channels like:

• Search engines
• Email marketing 
• Social media 
• Content marketing (i.e., blog posts or case studies)
• Referrals
• Webinars or events 
• PPC ads

It’s not always feasible for sales teams to sign into marketing channels and manually pull lead data from them. Ain’t nobody got time for that, especially if you’re setting ambitious quotas and sales targets. Sales reps need to focus on converting leads into sales, not the administrative burden of centralizing your data.

The best approach combines automation and a clear lead handoff process.

Both sales and marketing need to decide what constitutes a good-quality lead. Once flagged, your customer relationship management (CRM) platform should integrate with the marketing department's channels.

This approach eases the administrative workload for both departments. Inbound leads are imported into your CRM in real time, so there’s no need to pester your colleagues on Slack for an updated list of contacts every morning.

2. Quickly Qualify or Disqualify Inbound Leads

The inbound sales process has two great outcomes: closing a deal or quickly disqualifying a lead. Both are wins. 

The challenge comes when marketing sends a mega list of potential leads. You have finite hours in the day and ambitious quotas to meet. So, how do you narrow your focus?

An ICP helps you spot warning signals earlier in your conversations so that you don’t spend too much time chasing down someone who doesn’t have the need, interest, funding, or authority to convert. They also help you create content that attracts the right leads.

The BANT framework is a popular approach to lead qualification. It stands for:

• Budget: Can they afford what you’re selling? There isn’t much point in selling a $5,000 subscription to a scrappy startup, even if they would benefit from it. They simply don’t have the financial resources to commit. 
• Authority: Do leads have the power to say yes? Ensure you find this out upfront, even if it requires a straightforward question.
• Need: Do they have a genuine need for your product/service? Uncover their purchase motivations, like a goal they want to achieve or a pain point that needs to be solved. Prioritize inbound leads with motivations that your product or service can help with.
• Timing: When are they looking to make a purchase decision? Leads with an immediate need to buy should take higher priority when shortlisting inbound leads to reach out to. 

Say you’re working for a content marketing agency. The events team has passed on a list of people who joined your most recent webinar. You’ve qualified them based on the signup questions asked in your registration form—notably the “company size” and “budget” field—and you begin working through the list by shortlisting contacts that fit your criteria.

This is where seamless integration with your marketing platforms and data enrichment tools serves as a competitive advantage. 

You’ll be able to spot leads that have completed actions like requesting a quote or starting a free trial of your product. These micro commitments indicate that their need is urgent and there’s a pressing problem to be solved. 

3. Pitch Your Solution to Their Problems

Speaking of purchase motivations: If inbound leads reach out to you, it’s because there’s either a pain they want to solve or a goal they want to reach. It’s your job to understand that and tailor your pitch to them.

As author Aaron Ross writes in his book Predictable Revenue: “Customers don't care at all whether you close the deal or not. They care about improving their business. It’s easy to forget this in the heat of a sales cycle.”

Make the first move by getting your lead on the phone, sending an email, or an in-app live chat message. Your goal is to find out whether they’re a good fit and what they’re looking for. 

Sales coach Josh Braun puts this into practice and shares what that initial contact with an inbound lead looks like. His pitch reportedly eliminates 8 out of 10 leads… but those left have a nearly 100% close rate:

Regardless of how you contact inbound leads, the key is to do it quickly. Speed to lead means you contact them while you’re still top of mind, or even while they’re actively using your product.

We find that the longer we wait to call, the worse the name recognition is and the harder it is to get the trial in a place where they can answer some simple questions,” says Liz Stephany, Director of Sales & Success.

When calling soon after they start a trial, I’ve had several people say: ‘You read my mind! How did you know I wanted to talk to someone at Close?’ So it’s a very positive sentiment.

4. Negotiate and Close

If you’re selling to multiple buyer personas, remember that not everyone you contact will respond to the same sales pitch. The best outreach is personalized, so be prepared to change up your script on the fly depending on what your lead says. 

Make a list of common sales objections that inbound leads tend to have and prepare answers for each one. 

Here’s what that might look like in practice for a B2B digital marketing agency:

• Inbound lead #1: “We’re a startup business that’s just closed our first round of funding. Investors are on our back to hit profitability targets within the next six months.” Speed is important to this lead, so offer a case study of another client that saw a return on their investment within six weeks of implementing your marketing strategy.
• Inbound lead #2: “Our company just laid off the entire in-house marketing team.” Budget is a clear barrier for this contact, so consider pitching lower-priced packages—like a $1,500 retainer for a basic level of service—instead of an expensive, hands-on strategy. Ask questions like “When do you expect your budget to open up?”

This is a simplified version of the process—there’s a lot of nuance depending on your business and the people you serve. It’s also likely that you’ll have a bit of back-and-forth with a lead before they close.

Lean on historical data, including CRM or lead pipeline reports and customer feedback, to fine-tune your approach to closing. This iterative process will perfect itself the more you speak to your leads.

Creative Ways to Improve Your Inbound Sales Process

You’ve got a process nailed, but how do you differentiate your outreach from other brands? Here are five creative ways to stand out. 

Call Every New Trial Signup

Talking to people directly is the best way to move them towards a closed deal.

Follow-up phone calls put your prospects on the spot and force them to consider whether they are truly interested in your product. If so, you can talk more with them right then and there. If not, you can strike them from your list.

If they fall somewhere in between (the more likely scenario), you can get more information about their pain points, which will help you segment them more effectively for future outreach.

Inbound leads are probably more willing to pick up the phone than you might think.

Liz Stephany, Director of Sales & Success, says: "We get maybe a 8-10 percent connect rate, but the ones we do connect with are very appreciative of the call, especially when we can connect with them within two hours of starting a trial (our goal).”

Make this possible for your inbound sales team with a calling system that streamlines the outreach process. Close, for example, offers:

• Local phone numbers. Reach out to international leads with a local phone number or area code that they recognize. 
• Predictive dialers. As Liz says: “When we have enough team members (around four) to join on a predictive call, our calling rates increase and we can make our way through a large list of leads so much faster.”
• One-click voicemails. Leave contacts a pre-recorded message if they don’t pick up the phone, then quickly move onto your next inbound sales call. 

To see how this works in practice, Senior Account Executive Kate Petrone reached out to a SaaS company that was offering a free trial of Close to introduce herself and see how they were doing.

The customer said, “I don’t like it.” (In reality, she just didn’t understand it.)

After a few conversations about how the brand could get more value from Close, Kate managed to turn things around. The lead later upgraded their plan and added four extra seats—something that would’ve never happened if Kate had missed the initial outreach. 

Set Up an Inbound Call Routing System

You don’t always have to go out of your way to call inbound leads. Sometimes, they’ll pick up the phone and call you.

A call routing system can automatically direct inbound calls to the appropriate person on your team. It uses preset criteria to determine which salesperson is best equipped to handle each call and passes the lead directly to them (versus calling your main sales line and waiting for an internal call transfer at the switchboard, ultimately forcing them to explain their reason for the call twice). 

There are a few methods to determine which call should go to which person:

• Skills-based routing routes a customer’s call to the salesperson with the most relevant skill, knowledge, or experience level.
• Priority-based routing identifies a high-value lead and diverts their inbound call to the salesperson with immediate availability.
• Time-based routing diverts the inbound call to a salesperson within the same time zone or business hours as the lead.

Call routing is great for personalizing the sales experience. For a coaching business selling high-ticket coaching services, you could divert inbound leads from fitness businesses to a sales rep with experience as a personal trainer.

Build Automated Workflows for Inbound That Everyone Can Follow Easily

With thoughtful templates and scripts, as well as a clear journey in mind, you can increase your inbound sales success and cultivate active buyers more often.

Close makes this easy with automated workflows that take repetitive tasks off your rep’s plate. When a trigger is identified (e.g., the lead status inside Close turns to “potential”), you can automate tasks like:

• Assigning a sales rep to handle the account
• Sending an email or SMS 
• Creating a task reminder to call the lead or reach out on LinkedIn 

This is just the starting point—you can customize workflows to your heart’s content using filters, like assigning leads with the custom attribute “small business” to a particular sales team or rep. The options are endless. 

‎Create Inbound Sales Process Documentation for Reps 

For non-automatable tasks, create a library of support documentation that’s easily accessible to both sales and marketing.

Give your team straightforward instructions on how to speak about your product. Review each of your target audiences and discuss the main pain points for each one. Then, introduce all of the tools your product or service provides and explain how they solve customers’ problems.

But remember that the inbound sales approach isn’t set in stone.

“Marketers want consistent messaging, but no two conversations are the same, and no conversation is linear,” says Jason Grunberg, CMO at Bluecore.

“Imagine how frustrating it is for a rep to hear, ‘At the start of every call, you’re going to show this same slide and reiterate our value proposition.’ Reps need tools that show key themes mapped to specific concepts, and you need to trust the sales team to be opportunistic in using those tools.” 

Above All, Prioritize the Customer Experience 

You might have a handful of people involved in the inbound sales process for any particular lead. But prospects don’t want to feel like they’re being passed from pillar to post. They want a consistent experience—one that’s tailored to their needs.

Mor Assouline took this approach when working as the VP of Sales for a SMB SaaS company.

He says: “We knew the demo had to be more than a boring walkthrough—it had to be an experience.”

One of their favorite sales techniques was giving customers mouse control during the product demo. He recalls saying things like: “Remember how I said this was easy to use, and you mentioned that was a dealbreaker? Don’t just take my word for it. I’m giving you mouse control to [try out feature] yourself... what do you think?”

Final Thoughts: Inbound Works Better When You Combine it With Outbound

A combination of inbound and outbound sales allows you to cover all bases. 

You’ll have a steady stream of leads who are already looking for solutions, and a list of people who don’t yet know about your product or service—but would find it useful. 

The biggest obstacle to overcome when implementing an inbound sales process is resources. The time, energy, and money required to create these materials from scratch each time are too great. What you really need is a reliable system that will put your sales process on autopilot.

Here at Close, that’s our raison d'être. We provide the calling, emailing, SMS, social media, and sales training services you require to quickly get everyone on your team up to speed and overperforming. 

Want to see how it works? Check out our free demo today or sign up for a 14-day trial—no payment needed!